Apple’s iPad announcements are usually quick and modest: update the screen, install the latest MacBook chip in the iPad Pro, throw in a few sketches to dazzle for once, and call it a day. However, today’s iPad event surprised everyone by revealing another Apple Silicon chip: the M4.
In an unprecedented move, the iPad Pro actually overtakes the MacBook by gaining access to Apple’s newest internal chip for the first time. While it’s not a direct replacement for professional silicon like the M3 Ultra, M4 coming to the iPad Pro first means it’s likely your next iPad will be more powerful than the last. current MacBook Air (Or For that matter, a 14-inch MacBook Pro).
All of this has sedate implications for Apple’s place in the ongoing great tech war against artificial intelligence, in which it has historically lagged.
How is the Apple M4 chip different?
As you might expect, the Apple M4 chip is all about artificial intelligence. While M-series chips have always had a built-in neural engine (or NPU), the M4’s neural engine gets a huge performance boost. That’s still only 16 cores, but Apple claims it can now perform “38 trillion operations per second,” which is a claimed sixty-fold boost in speed over the company’s first neural engine. By comparison, the M3 Neural Engine peaked at 18 trillion operations per second.
“The neural engine in M4 is more powerful than any neural processing unit in any contemporary AI PC,” said Tim Millet, vice president of Apple’s platform architecture division.
That’s a massive claim for a chip that’s debuting in a tablet, and one that may not be true for very long (more on that later). But the M4 also improves in more conventional ways: in addition to the four performance cores, the M4 uses six performance cores, two more than the M3. Its 10-core GPU is largely the same on paper as the M3’s, although Apple claims rendering is four times faster than on the M2 – a multiple times boost over the M3’s processor. he claims he did it with an M3.
Apple also plans to continue to lead the industry in energy efficiency. “The M4 can deliver the same performance as the M2 while using just half the power,” Millet said.
Complementing these improvements is a fresh display engine, built primarily to support the iPad Pro’s OLED screen. This engine will power the device’s screen with a lively refresh rate of 10-120 Hz and also aid with brightness and color compensation. Brightness is a common problem with OLED, and it’s something the iPad Pro tries to fix with its fresh “tandem OLED screen,” which essentially stacks two OLED displays on top of each other. The display engine will also aid keep these screens in sync.
What does M4 mean for Apple AI?
All eyes are on Apple’s upcoming launch WWDC in June, where the company is expected to finally announce its AI competitor like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. The M4 chip debuting in the tablet first only fuels the fire under these rumors.
With the introduction (and subsequent disappointment) of standalone AI devices such as Humane AI and Rabbit R1 pinit’s clear that the market wants an AI implementation that goes beyond novelty and actually integrates with the mobile operating system. Such an AI assistant could easily schedule meetings, change phone settings, send text messages, and more. Google is expected to be the first to adopt such artificial intelligence Google I/O next week, but next month Apple’s mobile operating systems will easily follow suit. It’s unclear what the Cupertino developer has planned for the iPhone, but looking at it in this airy, it makes sense that the M4 would arrive on the iPad before the MacBook. Putting such a powerful neural engine in the iPad ensures that Apple’s tablets will succeed in what will likely be the next massive battlefield of mobile operating systems.
Ahead of WWDC, the neural engine in the M4 chip will continue to do what it has always done – enable you to perform fun magic tricks in Apple-developed programs. “It can do amazing things even faster,” Millet said. “It’s like easily isolating a subject from the background in a 4K video with one tap in Final Cut Pro.”
It’s impressive, but I can’t wait to finally see this kind of power applied to more solid purposes. Until now, the M-Series Neural Engine seemed like a forward-thinking solution because most of the AI was being moved to the cloud rather than running locally. M4 prepares Apple for the next stage of on-device artificial intelligence.
When will the M4 chip be available in the MacBook?
Apple’s M-series chips aren’t just for the iPad. Traditionally, they start later on MacBooks and then move to corporate iPads. While Apple typically doesn’t announce fresh MacBooks until closer to fall, the M4’s early debut lays the foundation for what the next generation of MacBooks will look like.
First, I call it: get ready for OLED MacBooks. OLED will appear in MacBook awaited for years, because it is already a mature technology when it comes to PC laptops. Since the M4 is equipped with a display engine built specifically to support OLED technology, there is no doubt that the next line of MacBooks will follow in the footsteps of the iPad Pro later this year.
OLED may even come to the MacBook Air despite being reserved for the more costly iPad model, as the MacBook Pro relies less on the entry-level M-series chip and more on professional-level refreshing, which in this case would be the M4 Pro, M4 Ultra and M4 Max. The fresh MacBooks will also likely integrate with Apple’s artificial intelligence initiatives, which Apple will announce during WWDC. This would give the iPhone maker a quick way to carve out a niche for itself that Google and Microsoft can’t, because it produces both full-fledged computers (sorry, Chromebooks) and smartphones.
What about artificial intelligence in Windows?
While Apple is working to set the stage for its massive AI reveal later this summer, it will still have some catching up to do. Following Google I/O on May 14, Microsoft told the media that it will host a surface AI event in Seattle on May 20. The company will present its “vision of artificial intelligence” there, which will focus on Windows on Arm.
This was reported by sources “familiar with Microsoft’s plans.” Edge in April, the company is confident that its fresh Arm-based Windows laptops will beat the MacBook Air M3 in terms of processor performance and AI tasks. Even with the release of the M4 chip, this poses a significant threat to Apple – Arm is the same architecture that powers Apple Silicon, and while it usually lags behind Intel and AMD chips in terms of power, it is usually much more proficient. If Microsoft can catch up to Apple in terms of battery life without sacrificing a lot of power, it will take away one of the few remaining hardware advantages MacBooks have over a much more diverse range of Windows computers, especially since the M4 won’t be confined to tablets until later this fall.
Time will tell how much power we can expect from Microsoft’s fresh Windows on ARM computers, which are reportedly powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor.
